Scott,

In 40+ years of experience in talking with bottle-collectors who dug 
"outhouse holes" throughout eastern Texas, only a few instances like 
this were reported to me. In the one case where I was able to get some 
really good information on the history of the site, the outhouse-hole 
was used as an intentional refuse pit to dispose of all trash (such as 
bottles, broken glass, nails, spikes, and sharp pieces of metal) that 
the new owner of the property (who had knocked-down the ramshackle old 
farmhouse, barn and outbuildings with a dozer in order to clear the 
acreage and return it to agriculture ... and was cleaning-up and safely 
disposing of anything he felt might run the risk of puncturing his 
pneumatic tractor tires ... the outhouse had been filled in the 1930s 
and dug by the bottle-collector in the 1970s).

Wells (and cisterns, in the narrow swath of eastern Texas where the 
Reklaw formation outcrops and where no good surface wells are possible)  
were very commonly used for this same purpose, too, and I have 
personally seen several of these filled to the brim with refuse like 
that you mention [clearly the contents cleared from an adjacent 
structure] (one of the wells I found, covered-over with a couple layers 
of thin rusty sheet metal in the yard of a modern residence in town 
[built on the site of an earlier Victorian, that itself had been built 
on the site of an earlier 1850s dairy barn], was topped-off with rolls 
of rare types of late-1870s flat barbed wires, probably worth a fortune 
to barbed-wire collectors).

Bob Skiles, RPA (retired)
Austin, Texas

On 4/7/2015 11:37 AM, Williams, Scott wrote:
> We recently excavated a late 19th century privy that was packed-literally-with artifacts. What is curious to me is the range of the artifact types: besides the usual medicine bottles and broken bits of pottery were whole liquor bottles (some half full), twelve shoes of different sizes, at least one book, a metal pan, lots of metal cans, other household goods such as condiment and perfume containers, and mattress springs.  We're thinking the privy was filled after the house was vacated, either due to the death of the resident or their eviction.  The material doesn't look like it was deposited in the privy over a long period, as if the privy was abandoned and then the hole was used for trash disposal over time.
>
> The privy is located in an area of packed glacial till, meaning that excavating the privy shaft would have taken some effort and filling it with trash while it was still in use seems counterintuitive (and assuming no one stuffs a mattress into a privy they are still using).  A nearby privy of the same age was more "typical", in that it was not packed full of artifacts and had a much more limited range of materials in it.
>
> Has anyone seen examples of privies that appear to have been purposefully used for one large disposal event, such as clearing out a house that became suddenly vacant? My experience excavating privies is limited.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Scott S. Williams
> Cultural Resources Program Manager, WSDOT
> Ph: 360.570.6651
> [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>
> WSDOT Cultural Resources Program<http://www.wsdot.wa.gov/Environment/CulRes/default.htm> on the Web
>
> "Development is not stifled by history, but enriched by it."
>